Chris! really sick pics..love them...but not much recipe in the exif - for example this pic below says 1.6 seconds at 5.6F.
but that is not the story - can you fill in exactly what you did here in the post process as well. like it was to a 4 year old. thx.
Sure thing. For the shot itself I guess it's obvious I used a tripod, and there was someone standing just out of shot to the right shining a weak torch at the person in the photo. The camera was set to 2-second timer, single point AF (focused on the person), f/5.0, aperture priority, ISO 100. The lens was the Canon 16-35mm f2.8L at 17mm. Ev was -1/3, I think I decided on that myself based on the RAW histogram rather than use auto-ETTR. Dual-ISO wasn't used for this one.
I generally try to avoid doing too much post processing so (hopefully!) there's less post-processing going on here than you might think. You can see the settings I used in Lightroom below. The first image shows the overall "Basic" settings I changed, the second shows a gradient I added to give the top half of the photo a bit more "pop" - in particular the gradient's clarity slider really helps bring out the detail and contrast on the person and rocks. The only edit I made was to brush out a distracting reflection of the headlamp on the water. I had tried hard to get the reflection right in-camera, but there was water dripping from the ceiling constantly and causing small ripples in the pool. After several failed attempts I gave up on getting the perfect reflection since my poor model had already been standing still for long enough!
The color profile was set to my default "Camera Standard". I didn't modify the tone curve at all, or anything else for that matter other than to add a bit of sharpening.
Finally for comparison, here is the photo straight out of camera without any editing applied at all:
Hopefully that explains the whole process but if you have any more questions I'll do my best to answer them.
